I do, of course I do! I pictured a subterranean passage that led them under the city and out into the open, where the two images simply merged, observation slipped into imagination; they were pure, innocent, and natural, and this is the point where my story of that coarsely beautiful man and the three women really becomes involved.
One reason I didn't like Frau Hübner barging into my room without knocking was that while observing the Tuesday and Friday twilight tableaux, or while concentrating on my fantasies about its absence, I experienced such a powerful arousal that to calm myself, and also intensify my solitary pleasure, I had to reach inside my trousers and touch myself; I would not move away from the drawn-back curtain; letting the fear of being discovered increase the tension, I stayed put and gently wrapped five fingers around my hard member pressing against my robe, doing it, of course, like a discriminating connoisseur, simultaneously cupping the soft testes and the blood-stiffened shaft in my warm palm, as if seizing at its source, at its root, what would soon erupt, and at the same time, with a certain amount of cunning self-control, I continued to pay strict attention to the events of the street, then to the silence, the absence of any action, and now and then to the unsuspecting passersby; I wasn't interested in quick gratification; delaying it kept me on the edge between the real spectacle and creative fantasy; the sudden rush of shuddering ecstasy, the convulsing spurt of semen would have deprived me of the very thing that, with the help of endless and timeless fantasies of pleasure, had nourished the body's delight in itself; delaying bliss is the way to prolong it; by touching my own body I could feel the pleasure of other bodies; I'd say that in this way my hour of shame had become the hour of communion with humanity, the hour of creation; consequently, it would have been most unpleasant if at such a moment Frau Hübner had entered my room; and it wasn't just the street I saw, I was there with them in the cellar, I was the man and I was also the three women, in my own body I felt their intimate contacts, and my imagination shifted the scene of their ever more serious game to that particular clearing, for that was where they belonged, the coachman became Pan, mother and daughters turned into nymphs; and there was nothing high-handedly false about this, because I had no doubt that this lovely meadow was very familiar to me; my imagination wasn't leading me to an unknown place; it merely took me back in time to a place that lived in my memory as one of the scenes in our summers at Heiligendamm.
My antique mural could only vaguely remind me of this realer-than-real place.
If you let yourself down the side of the embankment, constantly slipping on the loose rocks, and then followed a well-trodden trail, shielding yourself with your arm to keep the sharp-edged sedge from poking you in the eye, and then waded through the marsh, you came to a tiny bay where, as I've already mentioned, I had once surprised my childhood playmate, the young Count Stollberg, lying on the soggy grass, playing with his tool; he was lying on his back, with his pants pulled down to his knees, his head thrown back, his eyes closed, and his mouth open; the rhythmic movement must have made his beribboned sailor's cap slide off his head and it was caught in a clump of grass, its blue ribbons dangling in the water; he raised his hips in a gentle arch and spread his thighs as far as his pants, stuck over his knees, allowed; with rapid jerks of his fingers he kept yanking the foreskin of his little penis — everything about him was small and well-shaped; pulling back and releasing his skin, he seemed to have a tiny red-headed animal appearing and disappearing in his hand; his tense face was riveted to the sky, and I had the impression that with his arched torso, open mouth, and tightly shut lids, he was having some sort of discourse with the heavens, while with bated breath he was most deeply engrossed in himself; when indignantly, shocked by my own agitated reaction, I asked him about it, he very willingly and in his charmingly affable way proceeded to initiate me into the pleasant ways of squeezing pleasure out of one's own body; nothing bad had happened, he said, no reason for me to be angry, and in fact I should join him, and further, we should look at each other while doing it, that would make it even more enjoyable; at any rate, as I was saying, after a ten-minute walk on this trail you could reach the clearing, still breathless from the stifling silent air of the marsh, where suddenly the landscape would open up, and in the distance you could see the forest that bore the quaint name of the Great Wilderness and where, had I ever succeeded in writing my story, I would have taken my four characters, using clear concise sentences as their guide.
After this encounter, because of our shared secret, I was not only more deeply drawn to the boy but also afraid of him, almost hating him; still, we often took that trail to the clearing, a trip that to me also meant a kind of flirting with death, because I could never stop thinking of what Hilde had once whispered to me, as if she knew exactly what she was saying and why, how precisely she touched a most delicate nerve with her warning: "Whoever strays from the trail into the marsh is a dead man."
But we kept going back just the same, though of course we needed an acceptable excuse to disappear periodically into the sedge; since Dr. Köhler had his snail farm in this clearing, we had a chance to look around, watch the snails, and chat with the servants or with the scholarly doctor himself about the life cycle of snails, thus finding the perfect cover for our favorite pastime; the snails became our accomplices, and no doubt it was from the mire of these early lies that my ghosts arose, the ones I was frightened enough to describe to my father.
I realized that to write my narrative I first had to straighten out my own life, to break open and reveal every layer of my self-deceit.
But time, minutes and hours, resolved nothing; my body became my worst enemy: so many conflicting desires lived their separate lives in it that my head was unable to follow them, or to keep them under control by tempering them with reason; I could not establish within myself a suitable balance of sense and sensuality that would find its proper expression in clear, lucid words, the only possible system of communication for me; but this was not to be; consequently, the thought of doing away with my body stayed with me like a faithful friend all my waking hours; and yet the reason this never became more than a tempting thought was that my longings, imaginings, desires, literary ambitions, and the tension of little secret gratifications gave me such an abundance of pleasure, the pleasure of my own body, that to deprive myself of them would have seemed plain foolish; claiming that suffering was also pleasure, I allowed myself to take risks, to go too far, and that was the reason I had to keep imagining my own death, which would relieve the strain — indeed, I got so used to enjoying my suffering that I could no longer tell when I was genuinely happy; for example, on the morning of my departure, when my fiancée and I were lying in each other's arms on the rug and my glance strayed to the black leather case in which I'd carefully packed all the material I had collected for this story, even there and then, at the very moment the fluids of our bliss were flowing together inside her beautiful body, the first thought that occurred to me was that right now, this instant, I should drop dead, croak now, no better time than now to cease, to evaporate, and then I'd leave nothing behind except a few self-consciously mannered pieces of prose, a few glib sketches and stories that were published in various literary journals and would very quickly sink into oblivion, and the open, patent-leather case, which, in the form of raw and to others indecipherable notes, contained the real secrets of my life, that is all — except perhaps for my seed in her body uniting with her egg at that very moment.